SpaceX achieved a milestone this year by enabling the first private spacewalk. On September 12, millionaire Jared Isaacman and engineer Sarah Gillis, aboard a Crew Dragon ship, briefly looked into outer space. Everything was cheers and applause in that moment broadcast live, but previously an incident had occurred at the facilities of the American aerospace company, according to Reuters.
The aforementioned news agency points out that SpaceX suffered a power outage during the Polaris Dawn mission. According to two sources, the incident occurred moments before the historic spacewalk, and power was not restored until at least an hour later.
A hitherto unknown incident
The outage, according to sources, was caused by a leak in a cooling system located at SpaceX’s main facility in Hawthorne, California, which generated an electrical surge. And, although the mission was completed successfully, the failure affected the servers that housed the procedures to address the incident, so SpaceX had difficulties to transfer mission control to a backup facility in Florida. There were no hard copies of the procedures.
For a certain period of time, the aerospace company did not have the ability to remotely control the Crew Dragon ship in orbit, but communications remained safe. It should be noted that the Polaris Dawn crew was never at risk and, in the event that the problem with mission control had extended over time, the astronauts would have been able to control the ship manually due to the training they received.
Jared Isaacman on the first private spacewalk
The outage raises questions about SpaceX’s safety procedures and the disclosure of incidents by private space companies. This is an episode that has not been publicly released officially, possibly because SpaceX, like other private companies, is not required to do so by an exemption approved in Congress. As we have seen, the information comes from several sources consulted by the Reuters agency.
Both Musk and Isaacman seem destined to have important roles during Donald Trump’s second term in the White House. The former would lead a government efficiency initiative known as DOGE while the latter would take over as director of NASA, the largest government space agency in the world.
Images | SpaceX
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